Modeling anthropomorphism in dynamic human arm movements

Human motor control has always acted as an inspiration in both robotic manipulator design and control. In this paper, a modeling approach of anthropomorphism in human arm movements during every-day life tasks is proposed. The approach is not limited to describing static postures of the human arm but is able to model posture transitions, in other words, dynamic arm movements. The method is based on a novel structure of a Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN) that is constructed using motion capture data. The structure and parameters of the model are learnt from the motion capture data used for training. Once trained, the proposed model can generate new anthropomorphic arm motions. These motions are then used for controlling an anthropomorphic robot arm, while a measure of anthropomorphism is defined and utilized for assessing resulted motion profiles.